Uriah

The most spectacular military conquests of the last 2,000 years were accomplished by the Germanics, the Turks, the peninsular Arabs, Mongols, and NW Europeans; all ethnos who consumed substantially more dairy than the people they conquered.

The wide ranging conquests of the Vikings and the Arabs were accompanied by surprisingly impressive literary achievements: The Eddas, the Icelandic Sagas, the Koran. The frontal lobe is a Swiss Army Knife, useful for many tasks, but mostly stabbing things.

Nerds may not be perfect in many ways, but one thing you can never take away from them is that when they get together in groups they’re extraordinarily good at killing people.

NW Europeans are not smarter than other Eurasians. It wasn’t an Englishman that invented paper, gunpowder, or the water mill. There were early signs of a military superiority in the far ranging conquests of the Vikings and the French in the Holy Land, but nothing overwhelming.

But from the moment Gutenberg invented the printing press the rest of the world was doomed. The easy spread of literacy allowed the mental advantages of autistic milk drinkers to become apparent in the formation of scientific societies.

This advantage must have reached new heights with the internet. Why is semantic memory more important than episodic memory in warfare? It seems obvious, nw euros & Mongols, but where does it come in? Do they remember orders better? Learn from past experiences better?

Semantic memory is a byproduct of mental organization, clustering facts into categories like "mammal". I'm arguing that his type of memory is a only a "tell", an indirect indicator, like the tip of a much larger iceberg of superior planning and organization.